Samsung Announces 14nm Exynos 7 for Smartphones

Someone forgot to tell Samsung and LG that big product announcements the day before major US holidays is probably not the best idea, but hey, here we are. On the heels of LG’s announcement of the “luxury” Watch Urbane, Samsung went ahead and unveiled its new mobile application processor, the Exynos 7, built on 14nm process. The processor was built for next-generation smartphones, though Samsung wouldn’t specify if the chipset would be included in the upcoming Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S Edge.

Over chipsets built on 20nm processor (Samsung’s specifically), the new Exynos 7’s performance is improved 20%, but maybe more importantly, reduces power consumption by 35% and provides a 30% productivity gain. Samsung is also incorporating “three-dimensional (3D) FinFET structure on transistors,” which helps the Exynos 7 overcome performance and scaling limitations from the planar structure used in 20nm processes.

The timing of this announcement, being so close to Samsung’s March 1 MWC event, would lead you to believe that an Exynos 7 with this 14nm process would be featured in the next-gen Galaxys, but again, they didn’t state that.

Woo. They saved 6nm of physical space. La dee fricken da. Do you know how ridiculously stupid and utterly fangirl you sound right now? None of what you just said even matters in the real world.

Mark Aaron Collado

Does it mean it’ll be harder to root Samsung phones?

Vai

The snapdragon 810 and 7 octa are very similar it’s not worth arguing about.. Qualcomm just took the off the shelf ARM big little architecture (same as the 7 octa) without tuning the cores like they usually do. It’s a tock year for qualcomm in my eyes.

The just released snapdragon 810 is basically the exynos 5433 6 months late. The exynos 7 is so far ahead I find it funny when I hear so many fanboys claiming the exynos 7 is crap.
The 810 runs hot and needs to be throttled. I would like to see gaming performance.
It probably ran hot in the s6 because of samsungs ePoP.
This snapdragon testing was done on a “Qualcomm” unit.
Snapdragon 810

1222 3965 Geekbench
54251 Antutu

Exynos 7420

1520 5478 Geekbench
61000 Antutu

Big EZ

I was really excited when I got my first Exynos device because it was supposed to blow the snapdragon out of the water. When it came to benchmarks, it did. Although, in real world use the phone was inferior. I don’tccare anything about benchmarks, they don’t show how a phone will perform, only raw numbers that mean nothing in user experience.

seattle tech

Which exynos? Anything before the 5433 was mediocre. The older exynos around the time of snapdragon s 4 pros were better.

Daniel Walsh

The Exynos 7420 is an absolute beast. The Snapdragon 810 has many issues and is not up to par.

buckley101

LOL THE 810 RUNS HOT. Oh boy this is funny. There have been zero reports other than Samsung and 1 other Japanese company that the 810 runs hot. Everyone who has ran benchmarks on it and tested it to it’s limits could not get it to run hot. In fact, it runs cooler than the Snapdragon 805 due to the smaller die. Get your facts straight boy

“LOL THE 810 RUNS HOT. Oh boy this is funny. There have been zero reports other than Samsung and 1 other Japanese company that the 810 runs hot”.

Lmao at your comment above…Zero means none, if you admit that there’s been at least two reports of SD 810 overheating issues then ” there have been zero reports” obviously isn’t an accurate conclusion.

Naibas9

I’d be absolutely surprised to see this in anything before Q4 2015 (if even then), however the 35% reduced power consumption would help to explain the rumored 2600 or 2800mAh S6 battery and they did announce Exynos chip…

Sakuraba

Uh, it’s going to be out this March

Naibas9

Uh, what is “going to be out this March”? The Exynos 7 in the S6 (or any other phone for that matter)? What are your sources?

Sakuraba

No official announcement, but it’s assumed by almost every source now that 7240 will be in the S6. What else would they use?

Naibas9

Okay? Apparently I missed the announcement that the 7240 was built on 14nm, my guess is so did everyone else (including Samsung) that it was 20nm.

Sakuraba

If it was built on 20nm the S6 SoC would essentially be the exynos 5433 found in the Note 4. They’re not releasing their most important flagship in years on a 6-8 month old SoC

Naibas9

I agree they shouldn’t, doesn’t mean they won’t. Many thought the S5 should have been a 64-bit 808 or 810, but wasn’t…especially on the heels of Android 5.0. I haven’t seen anything (the above article included) that confirms a 14nm based SoC for any Q2 phones. It is only rumor and speculation at this point, and given Samsungs past history–to my orginal point–I will be surprised if it is launched with a 14nm SoC, or anything else before Q4 due the testing and time for manufacturing.

Sakuraba

You’re nuts, I’ll make a 100 dollar paypal bet with you.

Nabas9

I don’t know, I think too many are unaware of all the extensive testing and manufacturing that takes place months before announcing a device for release. Hence why we get FCC leaks on specs, designs, and such. Samsung is planing to ship and sell 12 – 15 million of these phones, that takes more than a couple of weeks to manufacture. The just announce *starting* mass production, so at best, I could see this in a Note 5 which wouldn’t see (given the past release schedule) until end of Q3 or into Q4.

Sakuraba

I think Samsungs fab capabilities are underestimated. They have multiple factories and partnered with Global Foundries. In addition they’re building there brand new billion dollar factory to crank out even more chips. Guarantee they’ve been planning this for the past 6 months. We’ve seen Exynos 7420 geekbench scores and Antutu scores that would suggest 14nm. I still think there’s no way they release S6 on Note 4 chipset.

TheDude

Seeing I work for the chip plant in upstate ny who builds these chips, you won’t be seeing this 14 nm for quite some time. MAYBE end of the year. We are just now staring to build and test 14 nm. They had problems with 20 nm, and now we’re on 14 nm. I wouldn’t get too excited over this yet, although tests look promising…

Keith Taylor

Wonder why not that many OEMs are considering the X1 chip. I don’t know a lot about it but it appears to be on par with the 810 and Samsung.

Josh Matthews

Samsung is a corporation made up of divisions that largely operate completely independent of each other, like separate businesses. Last year I watched an interview with the one of the heads of Samsung’s chip division. He said they compete against Qualcomm for inclusion in Samsung handsets the same way they do for other handset makers. Korean business is interesting.

Pavel Lukyanchykov

Waiting for Galaxy Note 5!

Adrynalyne

I am surprised there is so much support for Samsung on this when they have shown to be open source unfriendly.

How is Samsung so fast in 14nm when Intel is yet to get to 14nm trough their tick-tock approach.

zurginator

Intel started using 14nm for mobile chips a year ago.

okpud

Not a year ago, but more like 3-4 months. The Core M line is the 1st to ship on Intel’ 14nm. By the time Samsung ships anything in production volumes, Intel will have been shipping production 14nm processors for ~9 months.

This is all well, BUT! here the bigger question, Will this chip set work with LTE here in the US? This is the main reason why they’re be 2 different variants due to the Exynos not working with are LTE bands.

What other options were there that could compete with Qualcomm? I’m saying this is new competition and if it proves to outperform Qualcomm then I’m sure others will look?

TylerCameron

Older Snapdragons used to suck for batteries. My DROID Incredible, HTC Thunderbolt, and HTC Rezound had awful battery life.
My DROID X and Galaxy Nexus had okay battery life.
But when they came out with the S4, they stepped up their battery game.

Tyler

What does the Galaxy Nexus and the Droid X have to do with anything they both used ti omap processors.

TylerCameron

I know. My theory is that TI OMAP processors really had their power efficiency game strong. The DROID X had awesome battery life.

Tyler

First time I’ve heard efficient and the internals of Galaxy nexus referred to in the same sentence. That thing chugged on batteries like no tomorrow. Which includes idling with screen off(the other big drainer).

cdm283813

Those days were pretty bad. I remember carrying 2 spare batteries with my Gnex. I was lucky to get 2 to 3 hours of hard use from those batteries. I have a coworker today that has the Gnex and her primary complaint is the battery. She would be better off getting a low budget Android phone then mess around with that ancient phone.

Julian Andres Klode

Tell her to get a Moto G!

TylerCameron

My Galaxy Nexus made it through the day. That was good enough for me. Way better than the previous phones before it.. Except the DROID X. That phone was a battery life monster. The Rezound had THE WORST battery life. Ever.

Adrynalyne

The Gnex definitely did not. So that theory is shot.

Big EZ

Or its just proof that Samsung ruins everything.

Adrynalyne

LOL.

Big EZ

It wasn’t the snapdragon, it was horrible software. The stock thunderbolt sucked. It was laggy and had horrible battery life. Just flashing team BAMF’s stripped rom increased the proformance greatly, and doubled the battery life. The Droid X had a problem with ram management, which is why it sometimes would lag (and even freeze). A simple adjustment with a ram manager and that phones proformance rivals many Samsung phones today. It had decent battery life, I’d get 4 hours screen on time, which is similar to almost every other phone I’ve had. Once I flashed Liberty rom I started getting 6-6.5 hours screen on time. My Droid X on liberty had better proformance than my Note 2 with an Exynos processor even though it was two and a half years older.

cdm283813

I’m glad Samsung is ditching the Snapdragon’s this year. Once pushed the Snapdragon 805 can’t handle the thermal load at its rated speed/voltage. Just look at Gear VR as the prime example. I could easily trip off the cool down warning in less than 10 minutes of play if I switch between VR Apps. I put that blame all on Snapdragon. They over rated the chip to make it look good on paper.
It’s a beast when cool but when the thermal protection kicks in under pressure game over. I see the same happening with the 810.
And seeing that you’re the resident Samsung hater you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Tyler Durden

lol you’re blaming the 805 because of VR? That’s hilarious.

cdm283813

Well yes. If Toyota makes a car that is rated to travel at 90mph and it only does that for 10 minutes before dropping down to 65mph due to engine heat issues wouldn’t you be
upset?
Maybe the snapdragon chips should have fine print that reads; “Can only operate at max speed for 10 minutes before
thermal protection kicks in.” Plus more and more companies are starting to pay attention to VR. Just can’t blow it off because you don’t like it. Let’s face it. Qualcomm is overrating these chips to fool the public and Samsung sees it. What
good is operating a chip to the max for only a few minutes before thermal throttling kicks in?

Tyler Durden

Considering you need a powerful computer to run Rift, then why are we bothering with phones? Sounds like Samsungs problem for rushing a product when it’s not ready.

cdm283813

Like it or not but the future of VR is portable and wireless. I’ve never used PC Oculus Rift but if I did I can tell you that being tied to wires would be a huge con. I’m doing 360’s in my chair all the time with my Gear VR. Not only do you
not have wires that become tangled but it’s a plug and play experience. Plug the phone into the headset and play it in
any room in the house without a bulky computer/laptop. Plus none of this messy set up/tweaking process like you have on the computer.

I never said that the Snapdragon is not a capable chip. It’s only after the chip has been run for a short period of time at max performance do you see the thermal protection
kicking in. I’m betting dollars to donuts that the 810 would do the same thing under the pressure; maybe worst now
that you have more cpu’s to contend with. Your standard run of the mill phone/user will be fine with the 810 but Samsung is right in ditching them until Qualcomm has a better solution.

And just head over to Anandtech for a detailed comparison
between the 805 and 810. Pretty disappointing if you ask me.

Tyler Durden

lol not sure what future you’re looking at.

hkklife

In all fairness, I had 2x Note 3’s and they all had various thermal issues with the SD 800. Heck, I could make it lock up,reboot, or trigger a thermal warning but turning off power saving mode and shooting a handful of pictures in darkness with the flash on, especially if Wi-Fi, BT and/or GPS were all turned on! And yes, it wasn’t a corrupted microSD card and it did it after a hard reset in both internal and external storage. My Note 4, in comparison, runs much cooler and has better battery life.

I simply “trust” Qualcomm more for driver/future support reasons as well as their QuickCharging, though I understand Samsung bypasses Qualcomm’s IC in favor of their own solution. I got burned times by Nvidia (Nexus 7 2012, several Tegra 2’s), TI (every Moto I had between 2009 & 2011) and Samsung (Nexus 10, Droid Charge)

cdm283813

I agree that the Note 4 runs much cooler than any other
phone I’ve owned (Droid OG, Droid X, HTC Rezound, Nexus, Note 2 and Note 3) but when using the Note 4 with Gear VR it can literally make the 805 fall to its knees. For this reason alone if Samsung is serious about bringing Gear VR to the masses they need to find a cooler operating cpu. You can’t have over half of the people complaining about thermal issues when this thing goes full retail.

I can’t really complain because I knew what I signed up for;
it’s the innovator edition. But I love what I see so far minus the thermal issues.

TheInfamous Stephenson

I also had a SD 800 powered Note 3 (which a still own by the way), and no thermo issues for me.

TheInfamous Stephenson

Right… Samsung lying to push their own chips to themselves (which they’ve always used anyway).

All I’ve seem is blind Samsung hate in your post, you have no credibility whatsoever.

Tyler Durden

Where have they used an Exynos in a U.S. release other than the Note 2?

What “unreliability” have you had from an Exynos? And how are you measuring this “reliability”?

Nikuliai

He never said the Exynos were unstable nor some utter crap or something, he just said he has always had reliability with Qualcomm so it’s a good chip, AND besides that, that Exynos are Samsung exclusives so they don’t have a lot of support nor clients… Nevertheless if this pushes the market forward it will be good, so I’m not complaining…

But not buying either, Sammy hasn’t been my first choice in hardware for a long time and I could buy from them, but only if they have one or 2 years to make their platform reliable for system updates

zurginator

I don’t think the Exynos is an exclusive in the way people are thinking – my understanding is that a third party can use their chips just like they can use a Qualcomm chip, just nobody does (maybe because of price?)

Daniel Walsh

Meizu has used them before.

TheInfamous Stephenson

And where did you get this understanding from?

Exynos has always been exclusively Samsung, even while Samsung used Snap Dragon chips in the States they’ve always used Exynos is other markets…If Samsung intends on changing this I’ve seen no evidence of it.

Tyler Durden

Note 2 was showing it’s age after a while, while I can use any Qualcomm chip and it’s been just fine. SD400-600, etc

Adrynalyne

What unreliability does anyone have from SoCs? 99% of the people claiming they have don’t know wtf they are talking about.

Big EZ

All of the unreliability, but mainly unstability I’ve seen comes from poor software.

Nicklas

Everyone i now.

jamaall

We should all be excited right now. Qualcomm barely had any competition, but here comes Samsung to up the ante. They’re going to have to step up their game now.
What we should be worried about is the fact that Samsung just used Qualcomm until they made their product just as good. Who’s to say that they won’t use Android until they think Tizen is good enough? Either way, I’m still not buying a Samsung phone 🙂

Big EZ

I agree. Hopefully this will light a fire under Qualcomm and we see more power and efficiency in the future. However, I won’t be buying Samsung in the mean time. I already made that mistake on my last phone. LG or Motorola for me.

Sakuraba

Who wants the fastest phone with the best GPU, best display, and best camera? Yeah you’re right, good point.

Tyler Durden

I already have that. iPhone 6+

Sakuraba

Not going to argue most of that. Display Note 4 wins, but 6+ is the fastest with best camera. S6 will be the best on Android, I should have clarified

Jayracer7474

Im ready for over processors than Qualcomm. Its about time some over than them made something worth talking about. Any over questions?

Okay, Qualcomm, your turn, announce something so we can forget about this

sj0808

ummm.. qualcomm only outsources its manufacturing process of its processors, just like Apple does. So, Qualcomm can’t really do anything about Samsung going for 14nm because no other manufacturer (e.g., TSMC) can match 14nm (yet).

Nikuliai

unless of course you count intel

Pavel Lukyanchykov

more than that, Qualcomm’s last gen 20nm processors are actually manufactured by Samsung.

Honestly I’m no longer worried about the Snapdragon 810 I’ve seen the benchmarks on the 810 vs the current Exynos chip and the Exynos with less power perform on part with the 810. I think Samsung is going to kill it with the 14nm Exynos chip year. It’s over for Qualcomm, they got lazy and Samsung caught up go check out Anandtech for that comparison. I also belive the Exynos will solve the problems with Samsung devices

No but I think with the improvements Samsung has made with their chips I think it will have others looking. You’re forgetting Samsung does more than makes its own phones, they also make a lot of parts for other phones including iPhone I think that will be the advantage they are already known for great parts. Don’t let the hate overcome logical thinking

Maybe I do, I just pulled a 13hr marathon on Dying Light. Lol. But anyway that’s just what I think, we’ll see if others start looking at Samsung chips over Qualcomm.

Nikuliai

I don’t have much faith in that… even if their performance is on par and the exynos should have better battery life (because of size) Samsung would not be my first choice for SoC, simply because of system updates, that may totally change in the near future but right now SD is still the way to go (with 2015 flagships)

Nonetheless I hope it pushes the industry forward. Intel is working at 14nm too so they could go big this year and stop being just on ASUS phones

BTW, Samsung will be manufacturing the A9 chips for the next Apple mobile devices.

Tyler Durden

and what does that even have to do with Samsung chips? Apple designs them, Samsung just gets people to put them together. Says nothing about the performance of Exynos chips

Justin Faluotico

I wasn’t pointing out the performance of the Exynos chips in any way. I think he was trying to explain that the Samsung has mass produced chips for Apple before and won’t have a problem doing it for their new Galaxies.

Tyler Durden

Well, mass producing isn’t the problem I’m worried about, it’s performance and what not. Sure it benchmarks good, but we know Samsung has been caught cheating them. Aka when running a benchmark it will use all the power but during everything else, it won’t.

“Although Samsung was the first major OEM to be caught cheating in Android benchmarks, it appears to have completely abandoned the practice with the Galaxy S 5’s shipping software. Not only was I unable to find any evidence of the old cheats, I couldn’t find any evidence of HTC’s new subtle cheating either. The Galaxy S 5 appears to be clean as far as I can tell. Kudos to Samsung on doing the right thing, and I hope all other OEMs take this as a sign to stop the silliness.”

So while HTC has still been using the trick. Samsung has stopped.

Diablo81588

You’re wrong about apple designing their own chips. I don’t care what they claim, but I know an electrical engineer that works for Samsung in Austin and specifically designs processors for apple devices.

its the only chip that samsung did not make everything else was made by samsung.

nosoup4u

They made a portion of the A8 and is all in on the A9…

Jarred Sutherland

But .. but the benchmarks!!! /s

j

It’s over for Qualcomm!! Bankrupt tomorrow!

Jason B

14nm. Intel certainly learned a lot from going to 14nm FinFET. They spent billions to get it to market faster. Samsung took a slower route, but they’re ahead of TSMC and Global Foundries.

While 14nm would be wonderful for mobile devices, I think it’s too soon for good yields (even mighty Intel had issues). From a profitability standpoint, you’ll piss more money down the drain with 14nm when you’re tossing defective chips in the bin.

I think it’s better to just use 20nm for this generation of smartphones.

d-rock

How much did Samsung pay you to write this? We know they pay people to talk against their competitors and seeing as Samsung wants to supplant Qualcomm, this seems logical. I hope you’re getting paid b/c you seem to represent Samsung on some level.

I like Samsung and their products so I’m naturally excited about them producing more in house parts for their phones, no check required. I think it will be a game changer for them and may fix some problems they’ve been having software and financial wise. And what did I say negative about Qualcomm beside the fact that they’ve gotten lazy because lack of competition? I think a lot of people would agree.

Jarred Sutherland

How exactly will a CPU fix software problems? Their software problems stem from the fact they cannot seem to understand that bloatware reduces performance, and Samsung LOVES bloatware. A faster CPU simply means that Samsung can junk it up that much more.

buckley101

Hate to break it to you, but during real world use real world use you aren’t going to notice a difference between the two. Also, one could argue that the modem itself is more important than the CPU/GPU performance when it comes to phones. Without a good modem, it doesn’t matter what your processor can do, you might have a power hungry modem that is incredibly inefficient and slow. Hands down Qualcomm, has THE BEST modems in the world which is why all OEMs use Qualcomm SoCs. You’re not going to get a better modem, it’s what makes Qualcomm who they are.

On another note, it’s awfully ridiculous of you to say Qualcomm got “lazy”. Samsung is the biggest marketing gimmicky company in the world. If it wasn’t for them, we would still have 32-bit architecture CPUs and 2-4 cores, which is better than 8 cores and 64 bit. Qualcomm has been very open about this trying to tell customers not to fall for it, but there is stupidity in the world and in order to make money they are forced to follow. Most of it is marketing buzz words which obviously you have fallen for. It’s okay, I dont blame you, you obviously aren’t a computer scientist or engineer. So saying Qualcomm got lazy is plain stupid considering mid design they worked their asses off to get a 64 bit architecture SoC out on the market to keep up with all of these marketing driven companies. They have their Krait CPUs and the fact that they aren’t using them this time around and instead leasing ARMs CPUs shows that they must have been behind on their 64 bit design for the Krait. Just a side point, you’re calling a company that designs their own CPUs, GPUs, and modems lazy compared to a company who leases all designs in their SoCs besides memory….so yea, that’s a ridiculous statement.

Technical points for those who are curious:

fact: 64 bit architectures are slower than 32. They have a higher latency but have a higher throughput. Translating this to the real world, unless you have big data intensive applications (which you don’t on your phone), then 64 bit is slower.

fact: the 8 core, big.LITTLE implementation still need some research. The two problems were maintaining caches and the overhead it would take to copy cache from the big core to the little core. This has been taken care of so that’s good. They now share caches. The other problem is you need some type of monitoring program which can alert the thread scheduler which cores, big or little, to start scheduling the new threads on. THIS is very difficult and has multiple implementations. As per your anandtech site, it clearly states that Qualcomm’s implementation is significantly better than AMRs and Linaro’s implementations which Sammy uses. In fact, it’s so much better that this alone can make up for anything else that is slower with the 810 like memory frequency etc.

fact: Apple still uses 2 cores clocked at 1.2GHz and sits at the top of performance benchmarks. While Apple is marketing 64 bit cpus, their main drive seems to be to combine all their products under 1 OS so this is a move they are making to most likely work on this. I wouldn’t say their main focus was for marketing purposes like ALL of Samsung’s focus.

fact: Qualcomm is an American company. I live in America. I support the American economy.

fact: I am biased, but my opinions are also backed my technical data/information.

Hate to break it to you but that was way too long, lost interest after the Qualcomm got lazy part. Secondly no need to counter as I’ve already stated “I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert, I’m just giving my opinion” so you’re totally wasting your time, if you want some entertainment you’re better off watching a movie because you won’t get it here. Sorry bro.

buckley101

Then stop commenting. No one cares about your opinion nor does the world need to be influenced by your opinions with zero expertise.

Droid life has gotten so bad lately. I think Sammy fanboys are worse than Apple fanboys. Apple fanboys don’t have anything to backup their opinions with and Sammy fanboys act and talk like they know everything about hardware and software. Smh

Says the guy constantly responding, take your own advice and stop replying. I’m not paying for your “expertise” nor do I give a crap about it. Find a life. If you don’t like Droid-Life get lost and last time I checked there are no Sammy fan boys here just Nexus and Motorola.
FYI: Comment sections are for opinions you don’t have to be right.